Monday afternoon the Georgia House of Representatives Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee will hear HB 444, a bill aimed at maintaining the gold dome’s control in overseeing bans involving certain types of packaging materials. Rep. Tom McCall is the committee chairman and author of the bill.
Last week the Georgia State Senate passed SB 139, a mirror image of HB 444 by a vote of 32 to 19. The bill seeks to keep the authority to ban certain packaging materials under the gold dome and away from the hundreds of possible individual ordinances that could occur if each city or county were to take it upon themselves to ban items. In September of 2014 California’s Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 270, legislation that bans plastic retail bags and placed a minimum ten-cent fee on paper and heavier gauge reusable bags statewide. It would seem that the ban has had just the opposite effect of the intended legislation. In fact the bill is called a “solution looking for a problem” by most observers. The state has seen its local entities impose their own bans causing so much confusion that over 800,000 signatures have been gathered to force the state to put the fate of the legislation in the hands of the voters. The California bill was never about the environment. The overall opinion is that the bill was a back room deal between the grocers and the union bosses to scam California consumers out of billions of dollars while not providing the public with any direct benefit. It is clearly a regressive tax hitting those least able to pay more as they buy the most basic of necessities. Sadly the cities and counties of California chose to institute their own form of the bill and now a grocer on one corner is charging the tax and the grocer across the street is not. Some retailers are reporting that they have seen a twenty-five percent drop in business and blame the “bag tax” for the loss.
Georgia is a state that takes pride in allowing its cities and counties to observe as much “home rule” as possible except when the possibility for mass confusion and a regressive tax are possible. In this case the gold dome understands the bigger picture and is tasked with the job of not allowing its citizens to be subjected to a California style mish-mash of regulations that do no good for a problem that doesn’t exist. Texas Governor Greg Abbott affirmed while he was Texas state Attorney General that a Dallas bag ban violated that states law. James Quintero, the director of the Center for Local Governance at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said the pre-emption of city power was “new to the conservative movement here in Texas.” Still, he was ready to counter accusations of hypocrisy: “What we’re arguing is that liberty, not local control, is the overriding principle that state and local policy makers should be using.”
Florida’s legislature passed a similar bill in 2008. Georgia is not the first and certainly not the last state needing to pass this type of house-keeping measure.
The facts tell us that plastic bags are a better alternative to cutting down trees for paper bags, or importing the much thicker reusable plastic bags from overseas. If it’s the environment we are worried about, and we are, plastic grocery bags are clearly the best product. The very bags you used today to carry in your groceries, your prescriptions or your smaller home repair items are made with 70% less energy than paper bags and no trees are cut down. The same bags are produced with less than 4% of the water needed to make paper bags and again no trees are cut down. Finally, and maybe most importantly plastic bags are NOT made from an oil based manufacturing process. The bags are made from natural gas and are 100% recyclable and reusable.
Clearly the importance of maintaining “home rule” should always be our state legislature’s first objective but in this case it is truly liberty and the free market that need protecting most!
